Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane sent the following note to staffers worldwide:
All,
It’s been a busy month so far, with many new colleagues joining us. Thought I’d take some time to catch everyone up on all of these talented people.
First, Robert LaFranco, our new Assistant Managing Editor for Consumer, is the latest Forbes “boomerang” – that large breed here who have chosen to come home again. After a stint on the wealth team, Rob spent most of the 1990s covering entertainment for Forbes out of New York and Los Angeles (and helped launch the very first Celebrity 100). Rob comes to us from Bloomberg, where he helped start and then ran the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Before that, he was an executive at Warner Music Group, and the LA bureau chief and media editor for the Red Herring. In overseeing consumer businesses, he’ll help shape coverage and editorial products for entertainment, sports, media, gaming, food, retail and anything else people consume.
Having Rob in that role fully frees up ForbesLife editor Michael Solomon to continue the expansion of luxury product coverage here, including the Advisor initiative around cars, and the burgeoning Forbes Finds empire, which now producing 100 high-quality editorial stories each week, with recommendations from experts. Congrats are also in order to Tanya Klich, who joins this growing team.
Michael Nuñez joins us as an Associate Editor, covering perhaps the most zeitgeisty beat in America right now – social media and Facebook. Michael has already made global headlines here – others have said that his award-winning reporting on how Facebook generated its Trending Topics transformed the 2016 presidential election. He comes to Forbes from Mashable, where was the deputy tech editor; before that, he was the tech editor at Gizmodo and Popular Science. He’s based in New York, reporting to Laura Mandaro.
We welcome four new Assistant Editors. Marley Coyne (Under 30) was a Vanity Fair New Establishment Fellow and an assistant at the Hearst Design Group. She is the author of a memoir based on an essay, “Timothy McVeigh, My Dad and Me: How the Oklahoma City Bombing Trial Came Home With Us,” named Salons No. 1 essay of 2017, and a 2016 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Marley lives in Brooklyn and performs with the Upright Citizen’s Brigade. Brianne Garrett (ForbesWomen, Small Business) arrives at Forbes after 1.5 years at Wine Spectator, where she worked on digital, the magazine and newsletters. You can call her a foodie: While at Boston University, she was the editor-in-chief of TasteBUds magazine and was creator and executive producer of “Peek in the Kitchen” on BUTV10. Leah Rosenbaum (Healthcare & Science) holds a master’s degree in journalism and public health from the University of California, Berkeley, and a double major in writing and public health from Johns Hopkins University. For the past few years she’s freelanced for national outlets such as STAT and Vice’s Tonic. Based in San Francisco, she’s a new go-to for French translation. Hank Tucker (Money) is a recent Duke University grad, majoring in math and minoring in statistics. He was also an editor-writer-columnist at his school paper, The Chronicle, with internships at Bloomberg in Chicago and the Raleigh News & Observer.
We’ve taken numerous steps over the past 18 months to create clear career paths for everyone in Editorial. And as evidence of that, Hank replaces Jon Ponciano, who has been promoted to the Wealth team, as a reporter. Congrats to Jon! Jon replaces Maddie Berg, who has been promoted to staff writer, covering Hollywood. Congrats to Maddie! And also congrats to Amy Feldman, who has been promoted to Senior Editor.
Speaking of the future, Kerry Lauerman’s News Desk has come out of the gate roaring, fueled by three pioneers anchoring this initiative. Rachel Sandler is based in the SF bureau and comes to Forbes after an impressive lineup of internships at San Francisco Business Times, Business Insider, Central New York Business Journal and USA Today. She is a 2018 graduate of Syracuse University, where she was the digital editor of The Daily Orange. Isabel Togoh spent the last year at HuffPost UK before joining Forbes in our London bureau. She holds a master’s in journalism from the University of London and a bachelor’s from the London School of Economics. Her CV is long on stints at Press Association, the Guardian, Link Ethiopia and the BBC. And Lisette Voytko is a newly minted graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she received honors in true crime, investigative techniques and the business of journalism. Working out of our Jersey City headquarters, she was formerly a politics reporter at Gotham Gazette and a freelancer with Bklyner and xoJane, among others.
With a dozen or so more editorial openings, expect more announcements in the weeks ahead. (Remember that there’s still a bonus in place for referring new employees.) It’s a thrill to be growing and investing at a time when so many others are retracting and retrenching. Our success begets more success, and I’m so proud to be part of this team, the most talented group of business journalists in the world.
